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  SCRAPS

  THE RULES OF THE GAME

  VOLUME 2

  SCRAPS

  MICH! IIIIIS

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

  Lydia Davis

  The Margellos World. Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation first published in the United States by The Johns Hopkins University Press, copyright © 1997; this edition published by Yale University Press, 2017.

  Originally published in French as La Règle du jeu II: Fourbis, copyright © 1955 Editions Gallimard.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951993

  ISBN 978-0-300-21238-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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  CONTENTS

  Mors

  Sports Notebook

  “Look! Already the Angel ...”

  MORS

  “Curtain of clouds.”

  I always reacted strongly to these words—which evoked a theatrical space enlarged to the proportions of infinity—when I read them in a libretto, where they indicated the caesura between two scenes, of a work by Wagner or any other musician who chose, as did Nietzsche’s illustrious friend, to put opera in the service of a mythology. As I resume—earlier, perhaps, than I would have thought—a piece of writing I had decided (for reasons having to do with pessimism, let us say roughly, so as not to come back to this again) to leave dormant for an unspecified length of time, it is this “curtain of clouds” I think of, the figure of a nebulousness drawn before ones view as though to signify twice over the interruption of duration: first of all as the curtain that it is, of print or almost transparent pieces of gauze superimposed like the panels of a tulle skirt; then, as a vague image suggesting the chaos that is the negation of the temporal and spatial world ruled by our coordinates.

  Curtain of clouds. It is thus that the curtain of one’s eyelids sometimes appears when, still sleeping, one is already about to wake up. Like a proscenium arch or some other stage hiding place with control pulleys so rusted, dusty, or plastered with cobwebs that to maneuver them a true deus ex machina would be required rather than ordinary stagehands, a shapeless veil continues to cover our consciousness and our sight and at that point, an authentic curtain of clouds—just as opaque and just as vague—is formed by the sometimes reddish and sometimes darker film with which our eyelids appear to us to be lined inside when we have our eyes closed. The immense force, it seems, that will have to be deployed to move us from the first rough attempt to recover ourselves to a complete mustering, when—after the three blows struck in some unknown place by the mysterious stage manager who oversees the daily recommencement of the action—the footlights of what we persisted in concealing of life are no less mysteriously turned on; the anguish, as soon as we are drawn from the dark by this signal, of feeling petrified, restored almost to consciousness but without any control over these inanimate limbs, these scattered bones awaiting some last judgment; the despair, without the attenuation of any outcry, of ever emerging from the mattress of sleep that has become confused with the physical mattress—itself thick and fleecy—on which the night has lain down with us; the brutal event, finally, wresting us from these pangs when (without our knowing how such a vapor, with its stifling billows, could have dissipated all at once) we find ourselves with our eyes unsealed. The threshold of awakening being, therefore, quite an unpleasant one to cross, each time this return requires that we stay thus lucidly suspended in limbo for an indefinite length of time. An incubation in half-light, an anxious awaiting before the dissipation of the mists or the sudden withdrawal of the curtain as when there comes, for instance, after a period of confusion and torpor, the clear space that causes us to begin writing, impelled also by something that remains foreign even though it is inside us, and required to take a leap which we are never sure will be taken because it depends only partially on our will.

  I must, therefore, climb back up. Not only out of this metaphorical gulf—the sleep in which the desire and capacity to write can be buried for limitless duration—but from a much more actual hole: the hole that a book, the moment it has undergone its final transformation of being published, digs in the most intimate part of us, at least when the book in question is (as is the case for the volume that thus became fixed in place behind me early last summer) a work in which one has proposed, not so much to define oneself retrospectively, as to draw up one’s inventory and take stock with a view to going beyond oneself. A feeling of emptiness, not only because we have quite precisely “emptied” ourselves of what was in our heart and mind but because we feel actually that, well or ill received by the many or few people who have employed in reading it a variable part of the leisure time society allocates to them according to the positions they owe to their respective opportunities and the nature of the works to which—by vocation or not—they are constrained to devote themselves, this book will have been, for us, a real gesture in empty space compared to what we had hoped for.

  This accumulation of pages, which is today nothing more than the instrument of a disillusionment, had as its avowed aim to make us more vigorously alive (as though such an architecture, for which we had been both laborer and material, should, symmetrically, help in our own reconstruction); but now that this book has appeared, one sees that whether it is good or bad, and even if it should mark a stage in our progress toward a little more light, the only sure thing is that it does not exist or—if we make our evaluation without any romantic exaggeration—that its only existence is that of a book that has come to join thousands of other books, probably better than some of them but a “book” nevertheless and not the quasi-stellar projection of ourselves by which we might have believed that our fate would be—as though magically—transformed.

  To have, for a start, attempted to take one’s revenge on a life with which one was not satisfied, by seeking in the awareness of this failure an element of success, a basis for achieving in another domain something less insignificant and that this also, since one finds in it only inconsistency in the end, should have failed. To have next wanted—strengthened by this new fiasco as though by a liquidation—to try one’s luck once more in this life of which, whatever delusion one had managed to entertain, one was certainly not entirely weary and that this new attempt should also end in failure, in the undeniable recognition that there was a decided lack in one’s very life. Such is the all-too-real empty space—the actual hole between two chairs—from which I must now climb back up.

  Now, the fact is, I am expressing these groping thoughts with my pen in my hand—and am therefore already more than half engaged in a relapse. As though after each disappointment, even if it be a literary one, there were no other solution, I long ago made the decision to go back to writing. Quite simply, I can’t get started; my confidence being at its lowest, I mark time for months and mon
ths. Passing beyond that crisis of confidence, shouldn’t I go on despite everything and—like a sleeper half awoken remembering his dreams before hurling himself into his daytime life—indicate before anything else what occurred behind that curtain of clouds I must supposedly either lift or tear apart?

  Almost a year ago, I will say, therefore, I left on a trip to the Antilles and I came back last autumn. In many respects this trip certainly delighted me: sites at the end of the world and the beginning of time, palm trees, breadfruit trees, bamboos, tree-ferns, in short, all the enumerable features of a tropical setting that—without racking my brains any longer, and ceasing to stick at each idea and each word—I would perhaps not hesitate to describe as “enchanting” if, that is, this were really the sort of memory I wanted to talk about. I would like, of course, to string together a certain number of sentences—and, if possible, beautiful sentences—about the splendors of that voyage; become excited over the rich provision of images I brought back from it and, laying them out in a fan like (let’s say) the palms of a traveler’s tree spreading their half circles, try to revive my poetic vein a little. But that isn’t what this is all about. I am, nevertheless, at the bottom of the hole and begin to know all too well that I will not climb back out of it either when I want to, or, above all, very soon. More inclined, in any case, than to any other exercise, to denounce the not very heartening things I saw there: the deplorable living conditions in which the majority of the people of color find themselves, the greater number of them miserably housed and undernourished (when there isn’t famine, as there is for so many peasants of Haiti); the rich soil of the plain occupied by industrial cultures whereas the small peasants vegetate in the hills; the arrogance of the Creole whites—those whites so often the color of turnips, given that to most of them (especially the women) the sun is a scandalous thing from which they feel impelled to protect themselves as much for reasons of self-respect as health and given that the blood of almost all of them has been impoverished by an endogamous tendency stemming from caste pride—people who, on the whole, seem to think only about money and retain a slave-holding mentality; the nightmare introduced by that idiotic prejudice concerning the hierarchy of the races, a prejudice whose oldest and principal proponents have been the whites—who are as afraid of having an excessively swarthy complexion as of bearing the stigmata of the most ignominious of the so-called shameful diseases—but a prejudice that too many descendants of Africans display in their own spheres (as though every human being needed to feel that beneath him was another category of beings that he would not be able to enjoy despising if he did not recognize, in his heart of hearts, that they were like him); the generally stultifying ascendancy of the clergy and the tenacity of superstitions; the narrow outlook afflicting persons educated enough to regret that their island life keeps them away from the action; for the great majority, the insufficient number of schools; the difference in levels of wealth, one that is even more shocking than our own (for it exists over smaller spaces, where the contrasts are glaring); the horror of a society with such marked partitions that rich and poor do not even, in actual fact, speak the same language (since in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as in Haiti, French is spoken by educated people and Creole by the illiterate); the constant oppression of the small by the great, who regard the superiority of their standard of living as a mark of their belonging among the divine; the terrible rut of negligence or ill will from which no reform or change of regime has so far succeeded in wresting the administration of these countries, whose horrifying slave-holding past must perhaps be regarded—despite all the shreds of paradise one can encounter, here, in nature and among the darkest, at least, of their inhabitants—as the sign of a sinister vocation.

  Curtain of clouds. Brise-bise [draft curtain].

  If I look at myself, without seeking more than the immediate (and like one who, after too heavy or too agitated a sleep, first questions his mirror in order to be informed about the more or less altered look of his features), what do I see?

  For some time—and this only worsened upon my return from the islands—I had felt I was growing deaf in my left ear; in order to catch what was said to me, I sometimes had to ask that it be repeated, whence the feeling of an interruption in addition to an imbalance (as though one of the two halves of my body were no longer supported in the same way as the other); this led me, when I overcame my inertia and decided to get rid of it, to an otorhinolaryngologist who removed from my ear a fat plug of cerumen—”cire humaine” [lit., human wax]—using a stream of warm water. Continuing to feel disabled even after I was relieved of my semideafness, I then consulted my doctor, who found that my liver was enlarged and who held the threat of cirrhosis over me. Because my eyesight was also deteriorating (especially at times when I was tired, after an evening, for example, during which, though I hadn’t become intoxicated, I had drunk too much wine or liquor), this same doctor sent me to an oculist, and the latter to an optician, so that now I wear glasses for reading—even for writing—which gives me, when I am decked out in them, a feeling of pedantic heaviness that annoys me; as a result of that consultation I also use “blue eyewash” against conjunctivitus, which leaves a mark on my eyelids each time—or almost—that I allow myself to go wide of the mark. Suffering, lastly, from a discomfort in the back of the neck (an ache, a clicking sensation at certain times and when making certain motions), a discomfort that I had at first attributed to sitting in the wrong position during the crossing by air from France to Martinique, I was x-rayed about six weeks ago: the result was a series of three photographs—partial portraits of me as a macabre bust of “poor Yorick”—showing that I am afflicted with chronic inflammation (more simply, rheumatism?) of the first cervical vertebrae; and so now I am in the hands of a radiologist whose treatment I submit to even though he has not hidden from me the fact that, since my complaint results from the eroding of my bones, I must not expect a radical cure (because, as he warned me with touching care, one cannot put a thing back together once it has fallen apart). All this, coming in an avalanche of small troubles, not serious in themselves but signifying the approach of old age; along with that warning, just when I had decided to put myself back together, at least corporeally, after a love affair that represents a failure in my eyes even though I achieved the goal one ordinarily sets for oneself in this sort of thing or, rather, because of the very fact that attaining such a goal was tantamount, I may say, to breaking down a door that was wide open (something I realized very quickly but did not expressly admit to myself until after two months or so); because of the fact, also, that it’s like having nothing at all in front of you to be face to face with a young woman so eager to seduce you that by wishing, on each occasion, to model herself after the image she believes most suited to serving her designs, she is no longer anything but a lie and even loses all existence, whatever may have been the illusions to which her color gave rise. An affair that was objectively reduced to a mere aftereffect of my trip to the Antilles and that now seems to me to have been so shabby and so disappointing that I almost laugh at using the word love in connection with it. Discomforts of a physical nature, a misapprehension of the heart, thus both descended upon me within a brief lapse of time, as though having to pay a serious bill were necessarily the direct consequence of that trip, the most distant kilometer-wise of all those I have taken so far, and as though, overnight, I discovered I had turned into the bull who is still capable of reacting but for whom the cowbells are already sounding, announcing the final third of the fight, in which the kill takes place.

  Tumbled clouds. Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus.

  If I look outside, what do I see? Am I the only one who has been dealt what is commonly called a “coup de vieux” [sudden old age]? Is it the fraction of humanity that I am (a fraction even more infinitesimal than an Antilles island and one whom I wanted to disguise as “the Ghost of the West Indies” and make the pivot of a whole long poem in the manner of The Emigrant from Landor Road), is it solely this archipelago�
��so very subject to the fluctuations of the sea!—of words and perceptions oscillating once again between his writer’s table in a bourgeois apartment in central Paris and his office desk, who has entered—without knowing too well beforehand what it was all about—into this state marked rather paradoxically by a slowing down (combined with a sort of padding) of his whole being, correlative to a sense of an acceleration that is not yet quite dizzying, though that will no doubt come soon, of the exterior flow of time? Doesn’t the world also—that great body never wholly asleep any more than it is wholly awake—turn out to be afflicted with aging, without one’s being able to trust in the idea that nothing would ever, ever change for a sleepwalker of that species? Sticking, and marking time, whereas “events are moving fast” (as they say), weak sighted, hard of hearing, its mouth jabbering from having twisted its vocabulary in all directions, isn’t this world, of which I have just visited a part not far from the coast of America where absolute marvels do not prevent life from remaining difficult—isn’t this world traversed, these days, by nasty rumors running through it from top to bottom, from east to west, and against which stands out—issuing from some linguaphone with unimpeachable sentences even if their content is absurd—the moralizing voice of old Truman proffering, without a shadow of irony, the historic remark: I shall not hesitate, should it become necessary, to use the atomic bomb to maintain peace?

  But if I am justified in speaking of a failure that goes beyond my own person and if it is, in truth, unnecessary to cross the Atlantic to find reasons for it, a wider survey of the situation forces me to specify that it cannot be a matter of the world as a whole growing old. The ruin is limited to the society within which I grew up, to a singular though already time-honored mode of organizing human relations. In the eyes of millions of individuals of all races, isn’t China, for instance, which has been active for a long time now, presently a place where, day by day, the red spot of hope grows larger, as I heard it proclaimed one beautiful evening in Martinique by the mayor of Fort-de-France and communist deputy, Aimé Césaire, addressing all his people during a meeting held outdoors within the confines of the municipality? For a good hour, before the Marseillaise, then the Internationale, the loudspeakers—whose cones scarcely exceeded in diameter the corollas of certain flowers you could pick on the island—had joyfully broadcast beguines while on all sides the listeners poured in, one by one or in little groups of family or friends, among them many women wearing short dresses of a lightweight material, their heads covered with those vast straw hats people chose to wear after the sun had set or in the early morning for fear of the “serein” and flanked by a baby or a very young child which she would soon be holding up at the very end of her arms as though to offer it—signaling gratitude or ovation (oblation, I would almost say)—to the orator who draws support from the crowd, and the crowd from him, in an astonishing crescendo born of the extra heat sent back to the one speaking by the reaction of the people who have been struck to their very hearts by his speech and which he in turn sends back to them in the form of still more heated words that cause a new rise in pitch, a constant heightening back and forth until the apex of the acclamation.